On Sunday, President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down from his campaign for reelection this November. Soon after, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who is poised to become the new Democratic nominee by next month's convention. Today on the podcast, we revisit a 2019 interview between NPR's Rachel Martin and then Sen. Harris about her memoir, The Truths We Hold, her analysis of Donald Trump's popularity and her decision to become a prosecutor.
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Joyce Maynard's new book, How the Light Gets In, is a sequel to her 2021 novel Count the Ways, both following a family grappling with a tragic accident, its aftermath and the expectations they have for one another. In today's episode, Maynard speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about some of the big questions behind both books – "What is a typical family? What is a good mother? Is there such a thing?" – and why she feels it's imperative for her characters to live fully in the world, which means bringing politics and current events into their stories.
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One of the most difficult concepts for early thinkers to get their heads around was the idea of nothing.
Everywhere we go, all our lives, there is something. There is air and matter that surrounds us everywhere because if there weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.
Eventually, scientists and philosophers became comfortable with the idea of nothing and were able to study it. What they found was that nothing was actually something.
Learn more about vacuums and how the concept of it was accepted and then eventually created and put to use on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Actor, producer and director Griffin Dunne grew up during a fascinating time in Hollywood history. In today's episode, he tells Here & Now's Emiko Tamagawa he remembers bowing goodnight to his parents' black-tie party guests, like his aunt Joan Didion and his father's friend, Billy Wilder. His new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, captures his family's story in a bygone era of the entertainment industry — including his sister Dominique Dunne's death at the hands of her boyfriend in 1982, and the way that tragedy changed her parents and siblings forever.
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Just south of the United States and north of Guatemala is Mexico, a fact which I’m sure all of you know.
However, most people don’t know that much about Mexico. There are caricatures of Mexico, and many people are familiar with some of the tourist areas, but that’s about it.
In reality, Mexico is one of the world’s largest countries, and its unique geography has influenced its history and economy.
Learn more about Mexico's physical, cultural, and economic geography on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
For thousands of years, many theories have been put forward as to the cause of communicable diseases.
These theories ranged from the religious to the magical and sometimes quasiscientific, but what they all had in common was that there was no proof for anything.
Over the centuries these theories became dogma and often prevented a better understanding of diseases. It wasn’t until the 19th century that we got a clear picture of what the cause actually was.
Learn more about the germ theory of disease and why it took so long to recognize on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In October 1919, the champions of the National League, the Cincinnati Reds, faced the champions of the American League, the Chicago White Sox, in the World Series.
While Cincinnati won the championship on the field five games to three, the series will be forever remembered because of the events surrounding it. Even a hundred years later, it remains one of the most significant events in American professional sports.
Learn more about the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal, and how it almost destroyed the game of baseball, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Today's episode focuses on two summer reads trying to piece together some pretty big questions. First, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with J. Courtney Sullivan about The Cliffs, which follows an archivist digging through the history of a seaside Victorian house in Maine — and the generations of women who lived there — at the owner's concern that it's haunted. Then, NPR's Scott Simon asks Liz Moore about The God of the Woods, which grapples with the disappearance of a wealthy family's daughter from a summer camp in the Adirondacks in 1975.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday